WEINBERGER: MOBILE GARDEN, THE. LOIS WEINBERGER

Lois Weinberger plays a fundamental role in the art-nature debate: for thirty years now he has been developing the theme of gardening as a possibility of reconciliation between nature and human intervention. His work, in which his wife Franziska has been actively participating since 2003, has much in common with that of Gilles Clément and in particular with the concept of 'third landscape' developed by the French garden designer. Known above all for their environmental projects featuring dynamics of spontaneous expansion of the vegetable world in marginal and rundown areas of the urban fabric, the Weinbergers have been committed for years to interventions with high social and political content. In parallel they have gathered together an organic corpus of photos, texts, objects, preparatory drawings and video installations, a part of which now converges in the book edited by Claudia Zanfi. Among the projects documented in the book are 'Present, time, space', created in a dump on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, 'Recreation Yards', for the courtyard of Innsbruck prison, his intervention on the abandoned Kulturbanhof railroad in Kassel for Documenta X, 'The edge city', created with the homeless in Exeter, 'Portable gardens', a metaphor of nomadism and migration, and 'Laubreise', a project presented at the Austrian pavilion during the 53rd Venice Biennale